


a nice day to start again

by alamorn



Category: Atomic Blonde (2017)
Genre: Delphine Lasalle Lives, F/F, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 02:01:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12223476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/pseuds/alamorn
Summary: That's enough of sad tales,forget them.Delphine lives, and reads poetry.





	a nice day to start again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weytani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weytani/gifts).



> title from Billy Idol's "White Wedding"
> 
> While this fic does not feature anything out of line with canon I would like to warn that Lorraine does think briefly about allowing Delphine to die, after arranging to fake her death. If that will upset you, please give this a pass.

 

“They sent you here to die,” Lorraine says, running her hand up and down the soft skin of Delphine’s arm. She’s unhappy about the fact, but that doesn’t change it. She’s also a little unhappy that she cares at all — that wasn’t the mission, and is, in fact, totally fucking inconvenient. Berlin is supposed to be about burning bridges so well no one ever knew they existed in the first place, not building new ones.

She’s thinking about metaphors, that’s how silly Delphine has her. It’s a weakness, but she can’t bring herself to regret it.

“That’s what spies are for,” Delphine says, voice tight. “Dying.”

Lorraine looks down at her. Her jaw is held mulishly, and her eyes are bright. “How many have you outlived?” she asks.

“Ten,” she says, immediately. A number she rolls around often, then, holds in her mind, on the tip of her tongue. Ten spies, likely just as inexperienced as her, dead. If Lorraine knows anything about Berlin, and she fancies she knows quite a bit, they died messy and their bodies were left to make a statement.

“It will be more, before the Wall comes down,” Lorraine says and Delphine’s mouth twitches, a snarl, a grimace, a smirk. She can’t tell. Another thing to watch out for, like telling the truth. “I’d rather it weren’t you,” she admits, and can feel the change in her eyes, now that Delphine’s pointed it out. A tightness at the corners, discomfort at her own honesty.

Delphine smiles up at her. “Me too.”

Lorraine thinks for a while, tracing nonsense patterns onto Delphine’s arm. “Do you want out?”

“What?”

“To become a poet, or a rockstar. Do you want out?”

Delphine blinks. “I don’t think it’s so easy as that.”

“Oh, not legally.”

 

It’s agreed to, quick as that. Delphine wants out. Lorraine will get her out. And here’s the easiest way for all of them: Delphine has to die. If she stays with French Intelligence, both the CIA and MI6 will be keeping their sights on her. If she goes rogue, France will hunt her down. So she’ll die, or at least, she’ll appear to.

It’s a simple matter, really. She calls up Perceval and threatens him a little, and Lorraine waits in the hall, leaning against the wall, listening. And freezes. Delphine is a weakness, and Lorraine has spent many years carefully excising weakness. It would be easy to excise this one.

But it is not Delphine’s fault that Lorraine cares for her more than is safe, and allowed. Delphine is a person, not a weakness, and being in over her head does not mean she deserves to die. There’s a crash and a yelp, and she shakes her head and screws the silencer onto her gun and opens the door.

Perceval, a knife sprouting from his shoulder like a particularly unfortunate porcupine’s quill, flinches at the sight of her, giving Delphine enough slack that she thrusts her hand under her pillows and withdraws her gun, shoves it behind her against the meat of his thigh, and pulls the trigger.

He screams, a wounded animal cry, and drops the garrote. When he flees through the window, they let him go. He needs to destroy the evidence, after all, and Lorraine needs to make sure the plan’s gone off well. She traces the bright red irritation of Delphine’s throat and Delphine coughs, says, “ _Go_ ,” and leaves no room for argument.

 

Delphine doesn’t come to Paris. That would be too risky for her. But before she leaves, Lorraine buys a thin book of poetry. _Elégie de la mort violente._ She has enough French to know what that means. It seems appropriate.

She doesn’t have the opportunity to give it to her for several weeks. Well-deserved time off, under the watchful eyes of the CIA. They don’t send her to Panama. She’s too white, and anyway, you don’t spend a spy where a soldier will do. Instead they send her east again. Not to Germany, but someplace warmer. She sends a letter, and then, in a bar in Kuwait, she sees her. Bent over a pool table and losing badly.

She wraps her arms around Delphine and guides the shot into the pocket. When Delphine glances up at her, Lorraine can’t keep the warmth from her voice. “You looked like you needed saving.”

Delphine makes her excuses and leads her out of the bar. Somehow she moves slowly, calmly. Lorraine follows, controlled and sedate, but inside her blood is burning. If she thought distance would be enough to cure her of this obsession, she was dead wrong, but at least she is not dead.

They make it to the stairwell of Delphine’s hotel room before Lorraine forces her against the wall and plunges her hands into her hair, her thigh between her legs. Delphine whimpers and grinds down and bares her throat for examination. No marks remain to mar the smooth brown skin. Lorraine licks up the column of her windpipe just to make sure, sucking hard at the soft skin below her jaw.

She wants to mark Delphine, so that everyone who sees her knows, so that Delphine can never forget her, as she has not been able to forget Delphine. There’s a bitterness there, a resentment, that she put James aside so easily, and yet Delphine has hooked into her heart and to pull her out would be unthinkable.

Well, no. She’s thought it. She thought of never sending that letter, of leaving Delphine to live her life free of blood and bruises and an easy weighing of loyalty against life against advantage. She thought, while she heard them struggling, of allowing Perceval to strangle her, and rid her of an unbearable weakness.

Nothing is unthinkable to a spy, or at least not to a good one. 

But she discarded the thoughts as easily she discards names and selves, and here she is, with Delphine warm in her hands and her name in her mouth.

“ _Lorraine_ ,” she whimpers, “please, please.”

“Please what?” she murmurs, nipping at Delphine’s earlobe.

Breath shudders out of her. Her hips stutter an uneven thrust against Lorraine’s thigh. “In my room.”

“Ah,” Lorraine says, and forces herself to pull away. As they continue to walk up, she says, offhand, as if she has not been turning this moment over and over in her mind, “I have something for you.”

“You shouldn’t have,” Delphine says, and privately, Lorraine agrees. She shouldn’t have. But she had, and to leave without giving the book to her would be…silly.

“And yet,” she says, “I have.” She pulls the thin book out of her bag and passes it over. Delphine runs a finger across the title, then looks up at her, eyes impossibly soft.

“Thank you.” And then they're at Delphine's door, and they slide inside, and Delphine puts the book aside and draws Lorraine back into a kiss. "I've missed you," she murmurs into Lorraine's lips, and Lorraine wants to chastise her -- too honest, a visible weakness, startling in its blatancy. But Delphine's out now. She can afford to be honest.

Lorraine can't quite bring herself to be honest back. It's too much like a confession, and anyway, she's out of practice. She kisses Delphine deeply instead, bears her back onto the bed and relearns her body. Delphine is still beautifully responsive, still arches eagerly into her touch.

It makes her feel like something worth saving. She doesn't smoke after, just rests her head on Delphine's belly, while Delphine strokes her hair and opens the book of poetry, and begins to read. Lorraine's French was never good -- she doesn't have enough room in her head for a Romance language, she's full up with Русский and Deutsch -- so Delphine is speaking soothing nonsense, as far as she's concerned. It sounds sad.

"His wife died," Delphine says, after one poem. “I’m sorry for him.”

Lorraine snorts, despite herself, huffing onto Delphine's stomach. Delphine tugs her hair reproachfully. "Other people's pain is not less painful because you suffered more."

"No," Lorraine agrees, pushing herself up to her elbows and crawling up Delphine's body to hover teasingly close to her face. "And I've never lost a wife. I've no idea what that's like."

Delphine gives her a lingering kiss, then pushes her back down and begins to read again. She pauses in her reading and laughs. "Ah, how fitting. _You're dead_ ," she reads, " _you're not dead altogether_. You can't read French?"

"No," Lorraine murmurs.

" _Non_ ," Delphine corrects, teasingly. "A good spy can shoot blind after all," she says. "Or illiterate, anyway."

"I can speak and read in three languages," Lorraine says mildly.

"And I have four," Delphine says, laughter in her voice, and Lorraine has to kiss it out of her, trying to capture some of that lightness and joy for herself.

 

It can't last, of course. When she's extracted, Kurzfield is there, though he shouldn't be. "You're compromised," he says.

She thinks of faking confusion. Die with the lie is the rule of the spy, after all. But she's tired. She wants out. "Yes," she agrees, sitting across from him. She has a gun strapped to her ankle, and a knife in her sleeve. She can kill him if she needs to, but it won't accomplish anything. Might be satisfying, but she's long used to rating personal satisfaction behind efficiency.

"We thought about killing her," he tells her and she can't help that she tenses, which is unbearable weakness. Delphine has always brought out her soft underbelly. "I told them it would make you go rogue."

"You do know me best, sir," she says. If she had to, she could do serious damage to the agency. She's no Spyglass, to memorize the list, but she made a copy.

He quirks his lip at her. It's probably intended as a smile, but it looks like the tightlipped face a dog makes before it bites. "We're burning you. It's time for you to retire anyway. You're getting old and injured."

It takes her longer to recover after each mission, that's true, but that wouldn't have forced her from the field for years yet. She taps out a cigarette and lights it in a transparent buy for time. She holds the smoke in her lungs until she has the clarity of desperation. "What's my exit protocol, sir?"

He puts a gun on the table. She looks at it, then back at him. She agreed to die for her country decades ago. "Let's play a game," he says.

"Can't play roulette without a revolver," she says. It's her turn to smile, thin lipped and dangerous.

He laughs. "Oh, I'll miss you."

“Can’t say the same,” she says.

“Don’t be so obvious, it’s embarrassing,” he says. “Pick it up. Pretend you’re still a spy worth your pay.”

“Who’s being obvious now?” she asks. She picks up the gun. It’s light — no magazine. She checks the chamber anyway. Empty.

“Put it to your head,” he says. “Pull the trigger.”

She stares at him. “You’re getting dramatic in your old age.”

“Humor an old man.”

“An old handler, maybe,” she says, and puts the gun to her head. Even though she checked the chamber, she’s unhappy about it. She doesn’t know how this is going to end, and she’s finally got something she looks forward to. She pulls the trigger without blinking.

An empty click, just as she expected.

“There,” he says. “You’re burned. Nice symbolism, huh? You committed career suicide for this girl, you know that? You’re dead to the agency, you’re dead to me, yada yada. Get off my plane.”

She tilts her head at him as she puts the gun back on the table. When he just shifts back in his seat, she stands and gathers her things, feeling strange. Not quite bereft, not quite anything else. “Can’t say it was nice knowing you,” she says eventually, “but good luck.”

“Who needs luck?” he says and waves her away. She laughs, has to, and goes.

Delphine hasn’t made it far, and her face when Lorraine taps her on the shoulder…it’s worth it. It has to be.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Elégie de la mort violente_ is by Claude Esteban and is not only out of print but also seemingly impossible to find translated, which was deeply frustrating when all the scraps I _could_ find were so perfect. That's what I get for looking for French poetry from 1989, I guess. 
> 
> I highly recommend his poems ["It Will Be Evening"](http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/2055/auto/0/IT-WILL-BE-EVENING), and ["We Are Small,"](http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/2069/auto/0/WE-ARE-SMALL) which fit the mood I wanted, but were written twelve years too late.


End file.
